#NotAllAliens

 

They Live

1988

D: John Carpenter

**********

Pros: Some Style, A Memorable Fight

Cons: Terrible Political Themes, Shallow Strawmen, A Peevish Metajoke, Not Very Entertaining

     I’m generally a fan of John Carpenter's better works.  However, I generally don’t agree the hype that surrounds the one released 30 years ago today.  I’ve already covered Carpenter’s most criminally underrated movie, and now I’m going to discuss his most criminally overrated one.  Whereas Inthe Mouth of Madness is a perfect movie for those of us who shake our heads at the insanity of our current political atmosphere, They Live is a movie for those of us who attack trash receptacles and shout “That wasn’t real socialism” while dressed like Technicolor possums.

       Roddy Piper plays John Nada, a construction worker who has trouble finding a job because he’s a victim of the system.  He meets up with another builder named Frank Armitage (Keith David), and they arrive at a shanty town.  They come in contact with a priest (Raymond St. Jacques) who has been smuggling experimental sunglasses which reveal the true nature of the world.  As it turns out, color is an illusion, and advertisements contain direct subliminal messages spelling out messages like “CONSUME,” “OBEY,” and “REPRODUCE.”  It makes for good meme fodder.

My contribution.

 After a police raid on the rebels, Nada makes off with a pair and begins confronting the hidden aliens that secretly run the world and enslave humanity.  He begins to murder (unlike many online reviewers I do not use the term lightly) multiple ghouls left and right.  It’s pretty disturbing that the movie revels in the type of violence based on the logic of a mass shooter, but Rowdy Roddy Piper does say a LOL-so-random line before slaughtering unarmed people in a bank, so I guess it’s ok.

Picured Above: Heroism.

        What’s disturbing is the extremly dualist treatment of these enemies.  They’re aliens, so all aliens must be evil and therefore shown no mercy (he spares a human police officer).  While Carpenter emphatically denied the alleged Anti-Semitic themes, it’s hard not to read that in a movie in which an oppressive race controls society secretly.  It’s also hard not to see such themes as encouraging the fanaticism I’m seeing from the Left today.  There's also an appeal to Trumpism here, as well.  Forgiving a movie like this is difficult when you observe the hellhole our discourse has become in recent years.  There are problems with society that make us feel helpless, and these problems need to be fixed.  That doesn’t mean we should encourage whatever knee-jerk “solution” that just might make the world an even worse place.  The actions of They Live’s “heroes” could only be justified as pure escapism for a frustrated audience. 

        During his spree he briefly encounters assistant director of a cable network Holly Thompson (Meg Foster).  He later converts Frank after an iconic six-minute fistfight (a representation of “false consciousness?”), and the three embark on a mission to destroy the transmitter that emits the signal that dupes humanity.  They succeed, but not before Holly betrays them and all three die.  The movie ends with humanity's finally seeing the world as it is. 

        The movie is obviously a populist tract.  Despite its obvious appeal to the Left, there is a shot at unions at one point.  While it does tap into legitimate frustration at the difficulties faced in a rather broken and unequal society, its Manichean extremism approach is off-putting to say the least.  I understand the Millennial frustration; we were not well prepared for a more stringent job market.  Still, the outsourcing of jobs has produced a higher quality of living overseas while capitalism in general decreases poverty.  Our generation may just be taking a slight hit for Team Humanity, and should acknowledge it.  Complaining about white privilege doesn’t mean much when you’re complaining about how you’re not cashing in on yours.

        They Live also features human collaborators.  While I understand that collaborating with oppressors is terrible, there’s also a Horseshoe Effect between that and Identity Politics.  Nowadays an ideology’s “owning” demographics to the point where individuals in that group are no longer allowed to form their own opinions is rampant to the point where the Category Traitor has become a poisonous trope in fiction.  A good distinction to tell one extreme from the other is that the traitor sells out for his/her own gain while the idealist stands up for others outside his/her group, even at the expense of being rejected for it.  Cultural support or lack thereof is also an important factor.

         To make things seem even more shallow, Carpenter’s commentary was based on some rather faddish pet peeves, such as Reaganomics.  The black-and-white “reality” was inspired by Ted Turner’s colorization of classic films.  However, the most aesthetically unprofessional moment in the movie is at the end when two film critics, obviously representing Siskel and Ebert, are revealed to be ghouls while complaining about how Carpenter’s (specifically mentioned by name) movies are “too violent.”  It’s understandable because most of his films up to this point were good (The Thing was treated particularly unfairly by critics), but the temptation should have been resisted.  We didn’t let M. Night Shyamalan get away with this in Lady in the Water.  This aesthetic fecklessness would later be seen on a greater scale in Escape from LA, which reduces the dystopia to a farcical parody of the Religious Right.

         Now you’re probably thinking that I’m not being no fun, and I apologize for being didactic while critiquing a didactic film.  In fact, I might find They Live’s themes forgivable if the movie was more, well, fun.  The best way to describe They Live is that it’s everything wrong with The Matrix without any of the style or fun.  I think it’s fair to point out that just because something did it first doesn’t mean it did it better.  In addition to the better visual style and action, it had a more complex depiction of the antagonists.  Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) is oddly relatable because, like most of us, he doesn’t like his job, and his disdain for the humans’ sensory experience is an interesting inversion of this trope.  As much flak as the sequels get, they did address the extreme dualism by eventually treating the Machines sympathetically.  The ghouls in They Live are just strawmen and nothing more.  I’d acknowledge that They Live has a more positive treatment of Christianity, but it’s ambiguous and seemingly at odds with the movie's extremism.

        Still, I have to give credit where it’s due.  The movie clearly took some passion and creativity to make.  There is an interesting mix of Carpenter’s nostalgia for 50’s alien movies and his own contemporary style.  The idea behind the movie is praiseworthy, but the "heroes'" actions ruin it.  This makes the movie a sort of microcosm of The Left: good at identifying problems, but not always good with solutions.  The black and white cinematography is effectively stark and the ghouls look appropriately grotesque in it.  John Carpenter and Alan Howarth’s soundtrack does a good job capturing the tedium and frustration of the status quo but sounds somewhat similar to Ira Newborn’s soundtrack from Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.  However, I can’t really give a pass to a movie that enables our most negative reactions while not being fun enough to boot.    

QUOTES

NADA: A long time ago things were different, man. My old daddy took me down to the river, kicked my ass, told me about the power and the glory. I was saved. He changed when I was little. Turned mean and started tearin' at me. So I ran away when I was thirteen. He tried to cut me once. Big old razor blade. Held it up against my throat. I said "Daddy please"... Just kept moving' back and forth... like he was sawin' down a little tree... Maybe they're always been with us... those things out there. Maybe they love it... seeing us hate each other, watching us kill each other off, feeding on our own cold fuckin' hearts...